Common Product Development Problems: We Could Bring More Products to Market If We Had More Design and Engineering Resources
Wouldn’t it be great to have the ability to develop every product idea that your company comes up with? Unfortunately, that’s not the typical case. More often than not, companies come up with more good ideas than they’re able to develop. They don’t have enough internal resources to develop every good idea, so they’re forced to prioritize or more likely eliminate good, money-making ideas.
The lack of internal resources could be manpower resources or money resources. There’s no doubt that it’s expensive to develop a new product, and if a lack of sufficient funding is keeping your company from developing more products, then it’s obvious that product ideas will need to be prioritized and eliminated. However, if the reason your company doesn’t develop more products is due to a lack of manpower, that’s a situation that, in the end, is actually costing the company revenue.
In the current economic climate, it’s understandable that companies are hesitant to hire, especially highly skilled designers and engineers, since they often come with a higher price. But it’s still an option companies should explore. If the products that aren’t being developed do, in fact, show a high probability of being profitable, then a quick cost analysis should show that hiring additional design and engineering staff would actually be a profitable investment for the company.
What if you only have a few additional products that could be developed, a situation where additional design and engineering staff would not be used to full capacity? Or maybe you’re still concerned about adding dedicated staff because even though you currently have more products to develop than possible, you don’t know what the following year might bring. There are still options available to get those other products developed.
Outsourcing some of your product design is an effective way to not only develop more products but also to control the size of your staff and its related cost. One company we work with does this exact thing. They maintain a conservatively sized design and engineering staff. When they see an opportunity to expand their market by developing more products, they outsource the design and engineering, often to Impulse. If and when budget cuts come, or when the number of products to be developed decreases, the outsourced work is eliminated allowing the company to maintain a consistent level of dedicated staff. Then, as budgets or the number of products to be developed are increased, they call us back in.
The above scenario not only allows the company to operate within a specified and annually varying budget, but it also allows them to maintain a stable work environment for their in-house staff. If they were to add and remove employees as their budget fluctuates, the result would be a very unstable work environment. Instead, their staff has the benefit of stability, and as a result there’s very little turnover.
Impulse Product Development is a team of experienced product development professionals based in Indianapolis, Indiana. We’ve helped many clients work through the challenges of getting products to market and the need for fluctuating staffing requirements. If you would like to discuss the challenges that you’re struggling with, please contact us today.